Scepticism must be a component of our explorer’s toolkit or we shall lose our way. There are wonders enough without inventing any.

Carl Sagan

The Crucifixion 3

Apotropaeic or Pharmakos Rituals
The Levitical Scapegoat
The Pharmakos Victim Elsewhere

Abstract

The most important event of the career of the historical Jesus was his manner of death. Jesus was crucified. The Christian explanation is that a travelling holy man, the only begotten son of God himself, impoverished, docile and peace loving, who scarcely ever lost his temper, was thought such a threat to the rulers of Judaea that they sentenced him to hang on a cross, a death reserved for slaves and traitors. Christians say that Jesus was neither. He was not a criminal at all. But somehow this divine teller of parables had given the authorities the impression he wanted to be a Jewish king—to rival Caesar in one of his dominions—when all he really wanted to do was to save mankind from its sins. The Roman governor of Judaea even ordered the hanging man to be labeled with a sign saying “The King of the Jews”.

Apotropaeic or Pharmakos Rituals

An apotropaeic or pharmakos ritual is one in which a victim is chosen to take on and carry away a curse felt by a community. The best example, and the source of the common name for these rituals, is the Jewish scapegoat ritual. The word “scapegoat” was only coined by Tyndale in 1530 for the goat chosen by lot from among a pair of identical goats to carry off the sins of the Jews each year on the Day of Atonement. This biblical scapegoat was a pharmakos victim meant to cure the community of curses and sin.

The expression scapegoat has actually been expanded now to mean any victim disliked and picked on by a community or a mob—with no ritual involved in the least, quite the opposite—but the original scapegoat was picked as the victim of a carefully worked out ritual. It is better, according to theologian, B Hudson McLean (The Cursed Christ, 1996), to avoid unwitting confusion by using the term “apotropaeic” or “pharmakos” as technical terms for these victims and the ritual. The word “pharmakon” means a “cure”, whence pharmacy. Originally “pharmakoi” were magicians whose skill was presumably in healing. The pharmakos victim therefore became the one who cured the people.

We are heading towards the crucifixion. Jesus is depicted as a scapegoat, albeit of the conventional not the ritual kind, but the question remains whether the passion of Christ is a depiction of a pharmakos ritual. The point is not that he was treated historically as a pharmakos victim, but that, having been judicially murdered apparently for good reason, whether he was presented as if he had been a pharmakos. If he had been, the further question is whose idea was it. When Jesus is described as having died as an atonement, does it mean that his death was seen as lifting a curse from the people, namely his later followers, the Christians.

In ancient Greece, a pestilence was thought to be caused by a curse on the suffering people that had to be lifted. In Lives of Eminent Philosophers, Diogenes Laertius describes a pestilence in Athens thought to have been brought on by the deeds of a man called Cylon. The Pythian priestess told the Athenians to purify the city. Two pharmakoi, young men called Cratinus and Ctesibus, were meurdered and the plague ceased. The pharmakos victims took on the curse and their expulsion and death lifted it from the city. The myth of Oedipus exemplifies the purpose of the ritual. Oedipus was faced with a plague in Thebes. The oracles said the curse had been placed because a citizen has been the cause of the death of king Laïus. The one who turned out to be responsible was Oedipus himself, and so he blinded himself and left the city “bearing the curse” to liberate it.

B H McLean shows that the ritual of the substitutionary victim to carry off the curse was common in the eastern Mediterranean—“geographically and chronologically pervasive” to use his words. The ritual had three stages:

Selection of the victim, and animal or human marginal to society. The victim could be an animal, usually a goat, a steer or a pig, or a human being, usually a slave, a criminal or simply a poor volunteer.
The victim was set apart and given special treatment in an investiture ceremony that consecrated them, and transferred the curse on the city to the victim. The innocent victim was accursed instead of socirty. The victim had to be thought of as innocent to be effective. They were treated specially, fed on good food, and dressed in noble raiments, or decorated in some way in the cases of animal victims. Often they were scourged, though this was generally symbolic, with branches or merely leaves of sacred plants, just as Christ was supposedly scourged with a reed. The plants were often aromatic and so thought to be purgative. This was a notional purgation of the curse on society.
Finally, the victim was ritually expelled by being driven beyond the walls or boundaries of the city where they were sometimes killed to make sure they could not bring the curse back.

Though all rituals eventually came to be called sacrifices (thusia), the apotropaeic ritual was the opposite of a sacrifice, in fact. A sacrifice was a gift to please a god and had to be pure and perfect. A sacrifice that was notionally cursed was a contradiction in terms. The pharmakos was not offered to a god, but was driven out of society. Today, any victim killed for a ritual purpose is called a sacrifice, but the distinction should be remembered. A sacrifice is to a god, whereas a pharmakos simply takes on a curse to dispose of it in exile or death.

The Levitical Scapegoat

At least there is no disagreement among the experts on biblical matters that this scapegoat ritual was a “late introduction” into Judaism. How do they know this? Because there is “no mention of the feast in any pre-exilic text”, as McLean puts it. How do they know which texts are pre-exilic and which are post-exilic? Because the texts tell them! Yes, this ritual is post-exilic, but then almost everything in the Jewish scriptures is post-exilic. No Jew or Christian is willing to accept this, despite the evidence. They have a simple method. They ignore it.

The two goats equally pure, unblemished and therefore spotless, were decided by lot as being for Yehouah or for Azazel. The goat for Yehouah becomes a normal sacrifice, and the goat for Azazel is the apotropaeic victim. Since either goat could have been the sacrifice, both had to be equally unblemished. The priest laid his hands on the scapegoat and confessed the sins of the people thus transferring them to the goat which was then led into the wilderness.

By the time of Christ the ritual had developed and become more important to the Jewish cult. The goat was killed to make sure it did not return. By that time, ten booths were set up en route from Jerusalem to a steep cliff about ten kilometers away. The goat was led out of the city then from booth to booth being watered and offered feed at each one. Between them, it was booed and thrashed at by the crowds. At the last one, a red ribbon was tied to its horns and it was tipped over the cliff where it was quickly dashed to pieces (m Yom 6).

Azazel is always now considered a demon, but the noted scholar G R Driver thought the name simply meant “rugged rocks” denoting the wilderness. Judaism had held with demons as well as angels, these spirits stemming from the original Persian religion, but demons were part of the wicked Creation of Ahriman, and neither Persian Zoroastrianism nor Judaism would have offered sacrifices to anything wicked. The goat was therefore not a sacrifice to Azazel, as some say, and perhaps it looks. Certainly, after the defeat of the Persians by Alexander and the independence of the Jerusalem temple, the Hellenistic priests, the Sadducees, rejected all things demonic except as a pejorative expression for idols or anything else worshipped in idolatry. The Sadducees could not have considered the ritual as pandering in any way to a demon, and the rule they devised in Leviticus 17:7 forbids it. They would, however, have been willing to accept the ritual as apotropaeic and Azazel as being the wild barren and rocky places where sins could safely be left because no one lived there. The scapegoat is not a sacrifice to a demon but a vessel to hold the sins of the people until they were carried far enough away to be no bother.

Philo says that the Day of Atonement was the one traditional Jewish festival that lapsed hellenized Jews habitually continued to observe. Philo described the sins carried off by the goat as a curse. The author of the Epistle of Barnabas considers the sin of the people as a curse trnasferred to the goat, and he compares the goat with Christ, saying it is accursed, the type of Jesus, and spat upon. Tertullian made the same comparison. Long ago, Robert Roberts noted a similar ritual in Assyrian cuneiform tablets, but the victim was a sheep, and at the end its carcase was thrown into the river to remove any curse from the temple.

The Jewish scriptures have other examples. The story of the sons of Saul (2 Sam 21:1-9) has been noted by Walter Burkert as curiously similar to the pharmakos myth of Oedipus. A famine had raged for three years, and king David thought it was time to enquire of the Lord its cause—he consulted an oracle! It was the blood guilt of the city. The Gibeonites had been promised safety, but Saul had reneged on his promise and tried to kill them off. So, David selected seven of Saul’s sons as pharmakoi. They were handed over to the Gibeonites who promptly crucified them, leaving them hanging for the whole summer, and the famine ended.

Another Jewish example occurs in the story of Jonah. His intransigence in obeying God leads to him bringing a curse on to the ship he was travelling on. Threatened with shipwreck, the sailors decided to chose a pharmakos victim by lot, and the lot falls on to Jonah. Having been already chosen, Jonah volunteers anyway making the victim innocent. Cast into the sea, the storm ceased, and Jonah continued his Munchausen adventures by being swallowed by a large fish.

The Pharmakos Victim Elsewhere

Herodotus describes an apotropaeic ritual in Egypt in which the curses of Egypt were transferred to the head of a heifer which was fed to the crocodiles. Other animals heads were used for similar rituals, and it is the reason, Herodotus remarks, that no Egyptian will eat the head of an animal.

A Hittite ritual for cleansing the army of an epidemic was even more similar to the Jewish ritual. A ram was chosen and dressed with coloured wool, a fine necklace, a ring and a precious jewel. A chosen woman was also finely dressed. Both the ram and the woman were then driven into the enemy lines with the cry that whoever found them would be infected with the pestilence.

The Greek ritual was not necessarily just a one off. It was often an annual feast like the Jewish scapegoat festival. Two pharmakoi, one of each sex, were habitually expelled at the Thargalia festival to Apollo, held about the end of May. Initially, it seems it was to purify the city, May being a purification month, but it evolved to being a renewal of the people. It was done at the agricultural festival because the produce had to be protected from possible curses on the polis or the people. To omit it left a fear of drought, famine and plague.

A ram was sacrificed to Demeter. Barleycorn and other seeds and cereals were offered to Apollo, and between these two ceremonies, the pharmakoi were expelled in an annual purification of the people and spiritual renewal of them. So, its purpose was the same as that of the scapegoat ritual for the Jews. Pharmakoi were often decorated with a necklace of figs—black ones for men, and white ones for women—and were fed ritual food, including figs, barleycakes and cheese. They were also scourged seven times with fig branches particularly in the genitals while they were imprecated with curses. Besides Athens, the Ionian cities of Ephesus and Colophon had similar ceremonies.

John Tzetzes, the Byzantine chronicler, says the victims were the ugliest citizens, and their fate was to be burnt on a pyre, but Tzetzes also called the victim a sacrifice, which had never been said before.

The Greek colony of Marseilles, on the Mediterranean littoral of Gaul, had a pharmakos ritual that was told even by Christian chroniclers in the fourth century, like Lactantius. Servius says the ritual was performed when the citizens were suffering from pestilence and the scapegoat was merely cast out. Lactantius Placidus says the ritual was held annually, the victim was a poor man who volunteered to live at the public expense for a year, and, at the end of it, was led out of the city beyond the boundaries and stoned to death.

The city of Abdera (Thrace) had a pharmakos victim who was a slave bought in the market place to purify the city. He enjoyed a sumptuous feast, then walked round the walls purifying the city “in his own person”. He was then driven out by stoning. The commentator on a Callimachus line says he was stoned until he was driven over the borders, but a scholiast on Ovid confirms that a passage of the poet correctly implies that the victim was stoned to death.

What was the fate of the original pharmakoi? Plutarch and an episode in Philostratus’ Life of Apollonius of Tyana suggests they were stoned to death. B H McLean notes that, though the only extant account of the life of Apollonius of Tyana is preserved in Philostratus (c 249 AD), “it is almost certain that he was working with traditions that were contemporaneous with the New Testament”. According to Helladius, the pharmakos ritual held at Athens has its origin in the unlawful death of Androgeos which caused a plague. Harpocration says the Athenians would expel two pharmakoi during the festival of Thargelia. According to Ister, as cited by Harpocration, in the Athenian pharmakos ritual the victims were really stoned to death. In the myth given by Ister, the central character, Pharmakos, stole sacred chalices dedicated to Apollo, and the crime having been revealed, the companions of Achilles punished him by stoning him to death. The ceremonies of Thargalia commemorated this misdemenour. At the Thargelia of an unknown Ionian city rituals were performed in imitation of this event, probably a ceremonial stoning, being the pelting and expulsion of a symbolic pharmakos victim with bulbs of squills.

At Leukas in the Peloponnese, a criminal to whom a large number of birds had been attached by cords, was thrown from a cliff into the sea. The birds, attempting to fly away, were meant to lighten the criminal’s descent. Below, men in fishing boats, had to drag him from the water and ensure he was landed on some distant shore.

The Romans continued the tradition. They believed that the old vegetative deity of the previous season had to be expelled and the people purified to welcome the deity of the forthcoming year suitably. At the first full moon of the old Roman year (beginning at the vernal equinox), a man was chosen as the god of the old year. He was called Mamurius Veturius (The Old Mars), was dressed in skins and was driven off by scourging. Matching this, and probably another version of the same ceremony, was the expulsion of Februarius in the last month of the old Roman year (February, from the word “februare”, “to purify”). Here again, an old man was selected as the old year, was wrapped in a mat of rushes, and scourged to drive him from Rome.

Another pharmakos victim of the Romans was chosen whenever an army faced defeat. The army was seen as cursed, and to lift the curse, a soldier was chosen, dressed in imperial purple, and commanded to recite a prayer in which he offered himself for the good of the army and to bring destruction on to its enemies. He then ran ahead of the rest of the army into the thickest concentration of the enemy and gave his life to prove the curse had been lifted. So, said Livy.

Apollonius of Tyana made the people of Ephesus stone the “plague demon”—an old beggar—to purify the city, according to Philostratus.

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Last uploaded: 19 April, 2008.